The design and construction of art glass, commonly referred to as stained glass, is typically characterized as a very time and labor intensive endeavor. In most if not all instances the design and the glass itself must be specifically hand generated for each window, panel or other partition. Therefore, to date art glass works have been extremely limited in terms of applications and readily available sizes. Additionally, since such an extraordinary amount of manual creation and/or customization is required, the installation of art glass is expensive. Thus, a method and apparatus to design art glass for variously sized applications from a known parent pattern, while retaining both manufacturability and aesthetics of the original parent pattern, is desirable.
Almost all available CAD (computer aided design) packages today are capable of scaling drawings, along all axes or along just specified ones at the same or differing ratios. However, as those skilled in the art will appreciate, not all parts of the drawing will scale uniformly. For example, a circle may need to maintain its aspect ratio so that it is not transformed into an ellipse. Further, not limiting the example to art glass windows, a certain shape may need to maintain its size regardless of everything around it. An example of the latter may be a jewel in the case of an art glass window or certain sized threaded members (such as screws) in non-art glass applications. In either type of application, it will be appreciated that the issue generally arises for items which are available in predetermined sizes.
Thus, resizing CAD objects can be a difficult and tedious operation. When resizing with present CAD programs, a human operator must constantly review the operation and enter information to insure that the various required constraints are followed. Additionally, a human operator is required to review the implications of the constraints. By way of example, a line that touches a circle may have to be extended or shortened, and as noted above, there may also be other needed constraints due to availability of certain parts in certain fixed sizes.
Many plans, drawings, and detailed specifications are now done using CAD-type programs such as AUTOCAD or Vellum. These programs utilize and generate information on the objects in the drawings in a predetermined manner. Typically the information on the spatial location of the objects is provided in terms of [X, Y, Z] Cartesian coordinates. The information also generally includes size, location, etc. of the various geometric draw primitives.
To create a CAD drawing, an operator enters the designs manually into the CAD program. When creating a resized version of the design, the operator must recalculate and/or re-enter various properties for each variation from the original or parent design. By doing so, however, errors in the drawings may be magnified and cause problems during actual implementation of the design. Accordingly, due to these drawbacks, a design cannot be simply scaled.
More specifically, the use of present CAD systems in order to offer a wide variety of art glass designs for insertion into a wide variety of rough openings requires that either a large number of predetermined CAD drawings are stored in computer memory or that an operator recreate each design for each rough opening. In the first case, this system is useful only for predetermined rough opening sizes and, therefore, does not allow for custom sized openings. Additionally, it wastes computer space and requires that an operator initially resize each drawing with the drawbacks noted above. In the second case, the operator must resize each drawing with the drawbacks noted above. In both cases, the original artist of the parent design may not be able to constrain the design aesthetically unless the artist is part of the process of resizing each design.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an automatic resizing apparatus and method for designs comprised of draw primitives (and/or other objects) in accordance with rule based parameters. Further, there is a need for a method and apparatus which resizes original "fixed size" art glass designs while maintaining the aesthetics of the design by utilizing rule based parameters.